Ban bus stop adverts for junk food, says public health minister

Public health minister Jenni Minto has said the Scottish Parliament “should be doing more” to tackle health inequalities.

Speaking at Holyrood’s Health Inequalities Summit, Minto was asked about the progress and failures since devolution, following the report by the Scottish Health Equity Research Unit (SHERU), which showed life expectancy is currently on a downward trajectory.

Minto said that if she was first minister she would’ve banned junk food and alcohol advertising in bus stops, and that change “starts with the education” of children and cross-party collaboration.

She was joined by shadow health secretary Sandesh Gulhane who agreed with her on education being key.

He said: “What we really need to do is to get education into our children. But teachers are busy enough, they can't just do extra stuff. So, we need to make sure that there's this opportunity through things like having breakfast clubs and ensuring that we're able to not have hungry children when they're at school.”

However, Gulhane added that the state of the health sector was down to “a complete failure of policies” adding workers are “firefighting” to keep up with demand.

He continued: “Time is something that I lack as a GP. I haven’t got the time to do the things that I want to do to my patients, because we're firefighting, because we've got our nose to the grindstone. So, if you want to do more than just firefighting, we need to create the time for our amazing healthcare professionals to actually do what is needed”.

Carol Mochan, Scottish Labour spokesperson for public health spokesperson, said policies are fixed on “shiny” possibilities rather than delivery.

She said: “We need to work out how we get these policies in place. Who do we need to take on to make sure that those policies move forward? And how do we focus on delivery, as opposed to shiny things about what is possible?

“I'm not sitting here saying that me or my party are absolutely the ones that can do that tomorrow, but I think we need lots of people who believe that we do need to get that transfer if we're talking about inequalities.”